MSP

The largest consumer breach of all time - until now comes to us courtesy of Equifax. Americans think criminal hacking is the greatest technology risk to their health, safety and prosperity and they are right. What makes this breach so bad is this hack of the personally identifiable information (PII) of 143 million people will result in breaches related to this information for years - potentially decades to come.

In real-world terms, your bank and most other organizations you do business with use certain information to ensure you are you when you call or interact with them online. This information for over one-hundred-million of us is now out in the open.

If this news isn't bad enough, there are countless Equifax phishing scams to look out for now as well.

Many of you know I am the CEO of a tristate MSP/IT services company primarily serving NY, NJ and Connecticut and it helps me really understand how the IT market works. Most tech writers just stay in the vendor world where things work perfectly I am in the world of reality where things often don't work as advertised. The perspective is invaluable.

Even the companies with stellar reputations for simplicity and service have some products which make you want to flush them down the toilet from time to time. But you have to either use them or resell them to know this.

The load balancing market evolved into ADCs and these devices are now competing with cloud-based solutions. As this evolution has taken place, Array Networks saw an opportunity to take a page from the carrier market and explore virtualizing network functions.

In an exclusive interview with Paul Anderson, Senior Director of Marketing, he told me the company has a new network functions platform for deploying virtualized application delivery and security functions with guaranteed performance. In their testing, the company took a Fortinet firewall (with the appropriate licensing of course) and realized they could get five times better performance using software over hardware.

Although there is no guarantee you can be 100% protected against hacking, there are some basics you can share with workers to reduce the chance you will be hit by a cyberbreach such as malware or cryptolocker ransomware. Without further ado - here are the 5 Habits That Could Cause a Data Breach at Your Company.

1. Clicking on random advertisements: Cybercriminals have been using fake advertisements to disguise malicious software for decades.

Recently, we have had a great deal of feedback from attendees commenting that ITEXPO in Florida (Yes, Florida, in February – and airfares are literally dirt cheap) has evolved to become THE communications event – for the Americas and beyond. We are humbled by the comments but the credit goes to my team who tirelessly looks to improve each event with fresh new content.

An analyst told me once that the show is so full of information that you run around like a chicken with your head cut off, except he said it Yiddish which made it sound more exotic.

I wasn’t sure at the time if it was a compliment but in a way it is the testament that the show has so much important information that you really need a team to cover it all.

IDT Corporation has been a visionary in the VoIP space for almost two decades and I’ve always been impressed with the company’s technology and range of solutions in the SIP trunking and hosted PBX spaces. Recently, they have become very aggressive in the UC space, going after a channel and looking to be the disruptor in the market they helped create in the 1990s.

In an in-person interview, IDT/Net2Phone President Jonah Fink told me he thinks his company will keep people up at night. For example, IDT has had decades to build out its international infrastructure which includes POPs and nodes in five cities in Brazil as well as London, Hong Kong, Chile and Peru. They offer unlimited calling to Mexico and Canada as well as a core hosted PBX/SIP trunking plan which consists of South America, Western Europe and Central America.

I have been fortunate enough to cover the technology space – literally since the 80s and 90s – being immersed in the latest and greatest tech in the world and reporting on it to you. Back when magazines were all the rage, I was fortunate to launch one called CTI – which focused on the convergence of voice and data and later Internet Telephony Magazine which focused on IP communications and VoIP.

One thing missing in my decades of being in the media business was real-world experience. In other words, the hands-on knowledge you can only glean from installing and maintaining systems yourself.

With predictions about IoT devices numbering in the billions and revolutionizing every market from medical to industrial, a simple question remains. How will all these devices and solutions get sold? Who will deploy them, connect them, harness the data they emit in order to allow businesses to become more productive and efficient?

A common challenge for many businesses is having adequate connectivity. You’d think in the US this isn't an issue but I can tell you from firsthand experience (I am also CEO of a New York and Connecticut provider of IT support), in many buildings, the landlord signs an exclusive contract with a carrier and subsequently the tenants are stuck with one, often poor choice. Quite often, these buildings have only copper connections and they are generally very old. In other words, the telco locks in a building to avoid having to upgrade service to compete with cablecos.

By technology standards, Dialogic is a veteran – having been established in 1983, the company has supplied communications infrastructure used by carriers, enterprises and developers for many, many decades. The New Jersey company enjoyed the benefit of providing solutions which could be paid for by arbitrage. In the late eighties and nineties, Dialogic boards allowed companies to build computer-telephony solutions which used off-the-shelf computers to compete with custom-built hardware solutions from manufacturers of telecom equipment. Even though Dialogic boards were not cheap, solutions based on their products cost far less than alternatives on the market thanks to the ability to leverage PCs and servers.